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A Middle East state of mind

Ben KnightUpdated
Sun 15 Sep 2013, 7:30 AM AEST

At the height of the Syria crisis, when it seemed an American attack on Damascus was imminent, the ABC's North America correspondent Ben Knight suddenly found himself headed back to very familiar territory. Ben spent four years living in Jerusalem as the ABC's Middle East Correspondent, and left Israel less than 18 months ago. At the time, he wondered if he'd ever be back at all. Here's his story of an unexpected return.

Transcript

ELIZABETH JACKSON: At the height of the Syria crisis, when it seemed an American attack on Damascus was imminent, the ABC's North America correspondent, Ben Knight, suddenly found himself headed back to very familiar territory.

Ben spent four years living in Jerusalem as the ABC's Middle East correspondent, and left Israel less than 18 months ago.

At the time, he wondered if he'd ever be back at all. Here's the story of an unexpected return.

BEN KNIGHT: Spending four years living anywhere is a serious chunk of your life, but Jerusalem especially so.

(Music plays - 'Jerusalem, If I Forget You' by Matisyahu)

Jerusalem was my first foreign posting; it was where my children started school, and where I had some of the most joyous and terrifying experiences of my life.

There were times - many times - that we couldn't stand the place, but it was never, ever boring.

(Song continues)

In the end, when our plane took off from Tel Aviv on the way back to Australia for the last time, Ainslie and I clinked our glasses of champagne and breathed a sigh of relief that we were finally heading back to normality.

(Sound of aeroplane taking off)

But it wasn't long after we got back home to Australia that we started missing the chaos. All the time we were in the Middle East, we dreamed about clean and well stocked Australian supermarkets, with fresh food and ample parking.

But it soon seemed pretty dull when we compared it to our weekly drive to Bethlehem through an armed checkpoint to get to our pork butcher and the veggie market.

When we left, we wondered, in fact doubted, that we'd ever return to Israel. But two weeks ago, less than a year and half after I'd left, here I was about to touch down in Tel Aviv again.

It was the things I'd forgotten about that brought smiles to my face. I'd forgotten that each time a plane lands at Ben Gurion, the passengers burst into applause.

(Sound of wheels touching runway, and applause)

I asked a few people about this but I never got a clear answer as to why they did it. Some people thought it was a show of appreciation for the pilots; others thought it was relief that the plane hadn't crashed or been shot down on the way into Israel.

Others told me it was more likely just the joy of them having arrived back in the homeland - Eretz Yisrael, the Jewish state.

And that's the answer that made most sense to me.

I can remember catching a cab to from my house to go to Arab East Jerusalem one night, and the Jewish driver was not at all keen to take me.

Not only did he never go to East Jerusalem; he'd never left the country, and he didn't want to. He didn't want to risk dying outside of Israel.

All of this came flooding back into my mind as we drove down the familiar road from the airport to Jerusalem, past the park where I played soccer with my son on Fridays; the little shop where we bought watermelon; my favourite bar near the old city - although it's now Kosher, and it's not open on the weekends.

I expected to be in Jerusalem for at least two weeks, covering whatever happened after the US military attacked Syria. So as we drove in, I started talking with the ABC bureau's driver, David, about story ideas.

Should we go up to the northern border, where the bomb shelters had just opened? Should we go to Tel Aviv, where the defensive missiles batteries had been deployed? Or drive all the way up to the Golan on the Syrian border to find Syrian Israelis who support Bashar al-Assad?

We decided that we'd do it all - but it would have to wait anyway, because it was Friday afternoon, and nothing would be happening anywhere until after the Sabbath had finished the following night. As we drive through town, already we could see the black-hatted, black-coated orthodox Jews walking to the synagogues, and the traffic was emptying from the streets.

David told me about the story I'd just missed: there was chaos and arguments in a queue for gas masks in Jerusalem the day before I got there. I was surprised, because there didn't seem to be anything like panic on the streets or any fear of an imminent attack by Syria or Iran.

The scuffle over gas masks sounded to me less like fear and more like the way Israelis normally behaved in queues.

Suddenly, I got strangely nostalgic for rudeness. And it was then that it dawned on me that I'd forgotten just how different the mindset is in the Middle East, and how everything looks different from inside that tiny shoebox of a country.

When I arrived in Jerusalem two weeks ago, Barack Obama was gearing up to attack Syria, and he hadn't yet pulled back, but in the Middle East, he was already seen as a wimp because he hadn't gone in hard straight away. Whether people thought it was a good idea to attack Syria or not, what was far worse was to make a threat and then not follow through.

The Middle East is the home of the strongman: the quick decision, where you hit fast and you hit hard. It's also the home of what in the West you'd call conspiracy theories. The idea that the Syrian rebels, instead of Bashar al -Assad, might have been behind a chemical attack that killed hundreds of their own supporters just sounds too ridiculous in the West, but over there it's perfectly feasible - what better way to bring the US into the conflict? In fact, it wouldn't be surprising if that's what happened.

Nothing's ruled out. Every twist and turn is debated and discussed ad nauseam on radio, on TV, in cafes and taxis. Layer upon layer is dug into. And the great chess game is played out from the big players, like the US and Russia, all the way down to the rivalries of different tribes and clans in neighbourhoods; all of it interconnected, everyone with their own agendas and with infinite possible outcomes.

As it turned out, Barack Obama cut short my assignment by deciding to outsource his decision to attack Syria to the United States Congress.

So with the crisis on hold, the next morning I was driving out to Ben Gurion airport again with David, and I was wondering if I'd be back again in a week if a US attack on Syria went ahead.

I thought there was every chance it would happen, but David thought not. His idea was that the Russians would come up with a diplomatic solution, to slow things down, protect Bashar al-Assad, and embarrass the United States.

Nice conspiracy theory, I thought. The idea seemed so far-fetched I all but ignored it. And for the next week-and-a-half, back in Washington, I did not see one pundit who even came close to calling it.

('Jerusalem, If I Forget You' by Matisyahu)

And then, of course, it happened.

Did David make a lucky guess? Maybe. He'd been wide of the mark plenty of times before, but I had forgotten how a seemingly crazy prediction can, in the space of a good night's sleep, suddenly turn out to be not only possible - it has already happened.

It was a jarring, embarrassing reminder of the difference that geography makes to your thinking. It took a week to get my head back into Middle East mode, and for that alone it was well worth the trip back.